All 152 American Mahjong Tiles, Illustrated

A hundred and fifty-two tiles sounds like a lot to learn. It isn't. There are really only five things on the table, and three of them are just numbers with different pictures.

The three suits — 108 tiles

Numbered 1 through 9, four copies of each, three times over. Learn these and you can read most of what happens in a game.

Craks 萬

Short for "character". Say "three crak", never "three characters" — you'll sound like a rulebook.

Bams 條

Dots 筒

The winds — 16 tiles

In the American game these are ordinary tiles that appear in hands, and nothing more. They don't decide seating — dice do that — and nobody deals: each player takes their own tiles from the wall. Only East gets a name; the other three players are described positionally, as "to East's right", "across" and "to East's left".

The dragons — 12 tiles

The white one is either blank or lightly framed depending on your set, and everybody calls it soap, because it looks like a bar of it. That is also why a set can look as though four dragons are missing when they are sitting in the box unmarked.

Each dragon belongs to a suit, and you'll need this the moment you start reading the card: red goes with craks, green with bams, white with dots. It's the only place on the card where a colour points at a particular suit.

Which way it points depends on the printing. A dragon shown in the same colour as the rest of the hand is a matching dragon and has to be that suit's. Shown in a different colour it's an opposite dragon, and must not match.

Soap does double duty. Where the card actually prints a 0, that's a soap — but only there, and only as a zero. It isn't a free-floating zero or a ten, and a zero is suitless, so the colour it's printed in tells you nothing.

The flowers — 8 tiles

Here's the thing that saves you worrying about them: in the American game all flowers are interchangeable. Whatever is painted on the tile, whatever number is in the corner, a flower is a flower. Sets vary wildly in artwork and none of it matters.

The jokers — 8 tiles

These are the American invention and the reason this game plays nothing like the one it came from. A joker stands in for any tile inside a group of three or more — and never in a pair or a single.

They're worth their own page, and they have one: the joker rules, settled.

The count, so you can check a set

Group	Maths	Count
Craks	9 × 4	36
Bams	9 × 4	36
Dots	9 × 4	36
Winds	4 × 4	16
Dragons	3 × 4	12
Flowers	—	8
Jokers	—	8
Total		152

There's a physical version of this check, too. Each player builds a wall nineteen stacks long and two tiles high. Four walls of thirty-eight is exactly 152.

What you actually need to recognise on day one

Not all of it. Start here:

How to say them out loud

You have to name every tile you discard, so the vocabulary matters more than it would in most games.

• Suits: number first — "two bam", "seven crak", "four dot".
• Winds: just the direction — "north".
• Dragons: "red", "green", "white" or "soap".
• Flowers: "flower". Never a number.
• Jokers: "joker" — and if it's East's very first discard, that call is required.

If the tile you're throwing matches the previous discard, you can just say "same".